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Spooktober: Monster Mash - Dirt 159
298 Plays3 years ago
This week, we lift our spirits (oooOOOooo) with a round-up of monsters. We explore their origins and effects on us, with examples ranging from memories of very real things in the past to a hypothesis that doesn't quite have legs (unlike griffins).
Links
- Why we'll always be obsessed with – and afraid of – monsters (The Conversation)
- Why the scariest monsters look almost human (Wellcome Collection)
- Why We Still Need Monsters (Nautilus)
- Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids? (Nautilus)
- A History of Monsters (Aeon)
- Why do we want to feel sorry for monsters that scare us? (Gizmodo)
- Why Frankenstein is the story that defines our fears (BBC)
- Neanderthals, Scandinavian trolls, and troglodytes (Norwegian American)
- Ōnamazu (Yokai.com)
- Namazu-e: Earthquake catfish prints (Pink Tentacle)
- Namazu (World History Encyclopedia)
- Giant catfish and a legacy of disaster in one of the world's most seismically active regions (Phys.org)
- Folklore and earthquakes: Native American oral traditions from Cascadia compared with written traditions from Japan (Geological Society, London, Special Publications via ResearchGate)
- Why Protoceratops almost certainly wasn't the inspiration for the griffin legend (Mark Witton)
- Griffin Bones (American Museum of Natural History)
- Andrewsarchus, "Superb Skull of a Gigantic Beast" (American Museum of Natural History)
- Jumbies of the West Indies (The Brown Geeks)
- Rare Book Library Summons Tales of World’s Oldest Monsters (Smithsonian)
- The evolution of monsters in children’s literature (Nature)
- A Visual History of Society’s Monsters (Hyperallergic)
- The Nazi Werewolves Who Terrorized Allied Soldiers at the End of WWII (Smithsonian)
- Doin’ The Mash (Tedium)
- The strange tale of ‘Monster Ma
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're
Introduction to The Dirt Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Dirt, a podcast about archaeology, anthropology, and our shared human past. I'm Anna. And I'm Amber.
Defining 'Monster' and Cultural Sensitivity
00:00:29
Speaker
And this week we are rounding third in Spooktober 2021. A sport. I was like, which sport? I don't know. And maybe we need to bring the mood up a little bit.
00:00:42
Speaker
which I know is is rich coming from me. But like I know that my shtick is sharing stories where the scariest thing of all is ourselves. So let's kind of shake that up a little bit and talk about some straightforward literal monsters. What do you think Anna?
00:00:57
Speaker
I think that's great. Okay, great. Awesome. Let's do it. But before we get into it, though, I want to define monster for today's purposes. And just like think about the term for a second. When one Googles monster, the definition that pops up is, quote, an imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly and frightening. Merriam Webster defines. I was trying to avoid doing that, but it felt
00:01:23
Speaker
It felt like something that needed to be done this time. The two most salient parts of this definition to how I approached the sources that I pulled together for this episode are imagination and frightfulness.
00:01:38
Speaker
So we're looking to folk tales and mythology for examples today, but often discussions of this topic, including some of the sources in today's show notes, include among their roundups, deities of living and extinct religions.
Exploring the Frightening Aspects of Monsters
00:01:53
Speaker
So sure, plenty of mythology involves the actions and exploits of minor deities and sort of hero types from a past that's both history and myth.
00:02:02
Speaker
Um, but I do not want to, I do, I do not want to do this and I don't want our listeners to sort of merrily go down the path towards doing this. I don't want to paint the object of someone's worship with the same brush as a monster under the bed. So that's not, so yeah, things that have sort of.
00:02:23
Speaker
man animal quality like that's not like just because it may look weird to my eyes given my position in sort of the cosmos make it monstrous. Yeah, it doesn't make it much for this content and it doesn't make it objectively scary anything. Yeah, yeah, anything. So so that's sort of that's kind of my my preface my pricey to all of this. Oh, gosh. Okay. Well, and I did my best in the parts that you assigned me to excise any
00:02:52
Speaker
any mention of deities, etc. I did my best to go along with that. But what we're thinking about here is maybe something that your average cinematic or storybook monster thinks to themselves when they look in the mirror.
00:03:06
Speaker
Why am I here? What is my purpose? In other words, what do monsters do for us? What are the qualities that make a monster monstrous? And why is there often a major element of empathy built into monster stories? What has your monster done for you lately? This is now a self-help podcast.
Categorizing Monsters: Types and Examples
00:03:24
Speaker
Well, along those lines, here's a bit from a 2016 article in The Conversation by Leo Brody. Quote, there are four main types of monsters, according to Leo Brody. The monster from nature represents a power that humans only think they have harnessed, but haven't. The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, King Kong, and Godzilla are all examples of this type, an awesome abnormality that we can't predict and scramble to understand. It strikes without warning, like the shark in Jaws.
00:03:53
Speaker
I watched that recently. Does it hold up? Oh yeah. Oh, I have no interest in ever seeing Jaws. Oh, it's so good. I don't, I appreciate it as a touchstone of cinema. Yeah, truly. That's great. That's great for you. Love that for you. Hate it for me. While the obvious inspiration are real ferocious animals. Okay. The giant eagle shark. You're the one that accepted it.
00:04:18
Speaker
I know, and I'm mad at my previous self. Not all animals are ferocious, just don't get up in their space. Anyway, they could also be thought of as embodied versions of natural disasters, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Type two. The creative monster, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, or those Boston Dynamics robots. They now have guns. That's what we want. Put guns on them.
00:04:44
Speaker
The monster we have built and believe we can control until it turns against us. Like a self-driving Tesla. Dr. Frankenstein's monster's descendants are the robots, androids, and cyborgs of today with their potential to become all too human and threatening.
00:05:01
Speaker
The monster from within is the monster generated by our own repressed dark psychology, the other side of our otherwise bland and blameless human nature. Think the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll. When nondescript and seemingly harmless young people turn into killers or commit other atrocities, the monster from within has shown his face.
00:05:22
Speaker
and type four, the monster from the past. The monster from the past, like Dracula, comes out of a pagan world and offers an alternative to ordinary Christianity with his promise of a blood feast that will confer immortality. Like a Nietzschean superman, he represents the fear that the ordinary consolations of religion are bankrupt and that the only answer to the chaos of modern life is the securing of power. End quote.
00:05:49
Speaker
I mean, we said we weren't going to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror, but we're doing it early in this episode. The monster is us. It comes from all parts of our experience. Ultimately, the characters that represent the things we fear most come from forms of introspection.
00:06:04
Speaker
There are lots of other aspects of monsters and monstrosity to ponder, too. For one thing, why are so many monsters made from different animals
Hybrid Monsters and Human Imagination
00:06:13
Speaker
smashed together? Amber, I know you love a hybrid creature. I don't. Especially one that's at least part human. I hate that. I hate that so much. I know. If you're listening, don't do that. Don't ever show Amber a fawn. I hate that.
00:06:29
Speaker
Uh, we, we did a whole bonus episode, uh, dirt after dark, all about that. If you want to hear Amber hate for 45 minutes, I like blacked it out. You loved it. Um, this is from a 2017 piece on Nautilus titled why are so many monsters hybrids? I actually thought this was really interesting. Nautilus is so good. Quote. This is a lengthy quote, but bear with me.
00:06:56
Speaker
Every culture, it seems, has monstrous mashups in their folklore and religion. Composite creatures appear in our earliest literature and turn up in upper Paleolithic cave paintings. The Sphinx in Giza, half human and half lion, is at least 4,500 years old. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, 2100 BCE,
00:07:14
Speaker
Heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu battle a hybrid monster named Humbaba, described as having a lion's head in hands but a scaly body. The many Greek hybrid creatures, centaurs, satyrs, mermaids, pegasus, hydra, griffins, chimeras, are constantly resurrected in Hollywood. Constantly? I haven't seen a pegasus recently. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but...
00:07:34
Speaker
Literature over the last two millennia has added countless composite creatures and shapeshifters. More recently, we have regular hybridizing of humans and computers. So why all the taxonomic mashing and mixing? Humans have an innate or an early developmental folk taxonomy of the world, according to psychologist Dan Sperber and anthropologist Pascal Boyer. Probably that.
00:07:57
Speaker
We have a way of organizing the world into predictable categories for easy understanding, cognition, and manipulation. Even as small children, we seem capable of grouping people, birds, bugs, trees, and fish together into kinds, similar within their category, but dissimilar across categories. Not only do kids tend to see whales as fish, but early natural history made this error too.
00:08:21
Speaker
Our folk taxonomy concerning whales reveals the unsophisticated quality of our natural classifications. If it swims in the water and looks like a fish, it's a fish. To give our brains credit, however, our pre-scientific ancestors didn't need a more nuanced understanding of whales, and we had as much knowledge about them as was probably necessary for survival.
00:08:41
Speaker
Most humans seem to share very broad mental categories of taxonomy like animal, inanimate object, but also further distinctions like slithering animals, flying animals, and four-legged animals. Whether these are innate or learned, the adult mind uses these mental categories in processing daily experience.
00:08:59
Speaker
The brain employs the categories to parse the blooming-buzzing confusion of sensory information. We call this the Predictive Processing Theory of Cognition, emphasizing the brain's pattern recognition system. Our brains create predictive models of the world that help us extract useful signals from ambient informational noise.
00:09:24
Speaker
Woo, category violations strongly arouse the human mind. When our expectations about the world, snakes don't fly, are disrupted by, okay, well actually by flying snakes, but those are gliders. And anyway, I digress. Let's say winged snakes in the form of dragons. Remember the dragon episode that made me so mad? Go listen to that, listeners. Here there be dragons.
00:09:47
Speaker
The images grab our attention and become cognitively sticky. They stick in our memories, recall very easily, and spread throughout the social group. Hybrid monsters, in other words, make excellent memes." End quote.
Empathy Towards Monsters and Fear Reduction
00:10:01
Speaker
And remember, listener, before meme meant dumb pop culture joke you send your friends as a form of communication, it meant something that was repeatedly reproduced by oral or visual tradition. So, amémé.
00:10:13
Speaker
So these hybrids that are cognitively sticky are a way of encoding emotion. Fear, power, lust, all the strong feelings that we can't see or hear or touch get embodied in the monsters we create.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, so speaking of feelings, let's talk about feeling sorry for monsters. So one of the classic subjects of the horror genre, Frankenstein's monster, whose name is actually Adam, and really the real monster is people that find it funny to say like Frankenstein was the way, nevermind. So it's often portrayed as a sympathetic thing. The real monsters are hacky writers. Let it go.
00:10:54
Speaker
He's often portrayed as a sympathetic character. Why? Quoting from Gizmodo here, lots of people have talked about how empathizing with heroes or victims in a horror movie might make the movie scarier, notes Heath Matheson, an experimental psychology PhD candidate at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, but fewer people have written about the question of why we'd want to sympathize with a monster or the killer.
00:11:22
Speaker
So, Matheson believes there's a simple explanation for why we might want to understand monsters in order to fear them. Once we understand the monsters' motivations, we believe in their agency. So, Matheson says, sub-quote, that is, we come to understand that they are agents with powerful motivations and will work towards them, often seeking revenge on careless teenagers.
00:11:43
Speaker
The horror movies are often effective when the monster is not an agent, it's a natural disaster, something else mindless. A truly effective monster is one that we feel is goal-directed and able to achieve these goals." End quote from him. And Gizmodo goes on to say, there's also the fact that empathizing with the monster opens up the most primal fear of all, the fear that we ourselves could turn into monsters. Says Raymond A. Marr, an assistant professor of psychology at York University.
00:12:13
Speaker
Marr says, quote, people want to understand the things that scare them to make them less scary. I think we're driven by an innate and spontaneous tendency to empathize with everything around us in order to try to understand it and predict it all. The more we can relate and humanize a creature, hopefully the less scary it becomes, end quote.
00:12:33
Speaker
So there's this continuum of understanding. So if we understand the monster acts with agency, we fear it, but if we continue to try to understand the monster as an individual, we may be able to empathize. I think that's the same arc that happens when we humans encounter any kind of other. So monsters represent the unknown, the intangible, the emotional, but when those things coalesce into a character that can actually interact with the world of storytelling, that's when they become relatable.
Folklore and Historical Interactions: Trolls and Neanderthals
00:13:02
Speaker
So let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll do a monster roundup. I got my monster lasso.
00:13:10
Speaker
We're back and we're rounding up some, is that a yeehaw? It's a yeehaw, yep. Okay. We're back and we're rounding up some classic monsters starting with trolls who were already sort of undesirable characters in folklore, but whom the internet has given a truly awful name. So let's talk troll origins and specifically a theory that I think Amber put in on purpose as a little Halloween trick or treat for me.
00:13:35
Speaker
Arch-rolls based on Neanderthals? I am quoting norwegianamerican.com. In addition to modern growing scientific study of this interaction between modern humans and Neanderthals, there is also the much earlier, but mostly un-documentable, folkloric encounters of humans and what was considered non-human, even if legends suggest mating could produce offspring that would also be fertile.
00:14:02
Speaker
Some of the folklore beings that come up regularly in northern European culture include trolls and the like, marginalized creatures with mostly negative personae in the long traditions. The big what-if question probed here that is greatly speculative but also has intriguing potential for actual human prehistory, mostly unwritten, is whether or not trolls, for example, are vestigial human memories of Neanderthals.
00:14:27
Speaker
Fictive or not, William Golding hypothesized human Neanderthal interaction in his 1955 novel, The Inheritors. He was the Lord of the Rings guy? Lord of the Flies. That's what I'm talking about. Thanks. Lord of the Flies. I know the difference.
00:14:44
Speaker
I know you do. I know you do. More to the topic here, Finnish paleontologist Bjorn Korten was one of the first to hint at this idea of Neanderthals as trolls in fictionalized narratives in the 1970s and 80s.
00:15:01
Speaker
Another prescient Finn, Andreas Heinekran, formerly of the Swedish Natural History Museum and trained in entomology, so definitely up on his Neanderthals, has also sagely popularized the possible troll Neanderthal connection at least as early as 2012. What does he have to need to know about Neanderthals to think about the deep history and myth? I just think it's an interesting hobby for a bug guy, but sure.
00:15:30
Speaker
Why not think about trolls in the long hours between beetles? There are also the long-standing Scandinavian folk traditions that trolls long-antidated humans in the North as the old ones, and that they are usually described as unattractive relative to humans.
00:15:47
Speaker
Trolls, however, are often difficult to define as mythical creatures with possible meanings shifting throughout Scandinavian literature, and they sometimes possess magical powers that cannot be explained by the late sagas, since Icelandic literature preserves in writing what may not have been recorded in prior Old Norse oral tales. Trolls are sometimes enlarged into huge creatures when connected to the Old Jotun, or ancient ice giants, in Norway, whose rocky abodes were along the spine of the glacially-hewned mountains of the same name,
00:16:18
Speaker
Jotunheimen." End quote.
Cultural Symbolism in Japanese Mythology
00:16:19
Speaker
And then, from later in this article, a truly tenuous linguistic clue, quote, The meaning of the Greek word troglodyte, now glossed as cavemen, seems a fairly old one, compounded together from at least Aristotle in the 4th century BCE in his Departibus Animalium.
00:16:37
Speaker
which he wrote around 350 BCE, but at first referencing animals that dwell in holes and then cavemen in other authors, according to the Greek lexicon. The original meme word or idea of troll as cave dweller, possibly from the same root as troglodyte in Proto-Indo-European, could even be a linguistic artifact of this possible memory, although Old Norse only has the written word troll from the medieval period onward, as mentioned above.
00:17:07
Speaker
So next up, we head to Japan, whose folklore abounds with stories of yokai, which are supernatural entities or specters that aren't by default evil or necessarily even all that spooky. But there's one that I'd like to focus on today, which is in its own way, a callback to our last episode and my reports of man-sized catfish in the Ohio River. I'm not even man-sized. Now take that man-sized catfish and make it bigger.
00:17:35
Speaker
like super big, like giant man-sized catfish. Now you've got a nomazu. So onomazu are just like regular catfish, only massive. In fact, massive enough to cause destruction when they act up. So according to a very cool website and kind of sort of encyclopedia of yokai, yokai.com,
00:17:59
Speaker
They say, quote, long ago, common belief was that earthquakes were caused by large dragons which lived deep in the earth. During the Edo period, the idea of catfish causing earthquakes gradually began to displace dragons in popular lore as the origin of seismic activity.
00:18:17
Speaker
By the 1855 Great Anzai Earthquake, the Onomatsu had become the popular culprit to blame for earthquakes. This was due mostly to the hundreds of illustrations of thrashing catfish which accompanied newspapers reporting news of that disaster. They were so popular that they spawned an entire genre of woodblock print called Namadzu-i, catfish pictures.
00:18:40
Speaker
So the reason catfish came to represent Earth, have you seen catfish thrash? So, so catfish thrash, they just kind of freak out. So have you ever gone catfishing? No.
00:18:53
Speaker
OK, well, when you get them out, they get thrashy, and it's upsetting. So the reason catfish came to represent earthquakes was due to a large number of witnesses observing catfish behaving oddly, so thrashing about violently for seemingly no reason, just before an earthquake. So rumor quickly spread that the catfish had some kind of ability to foresee the coming disaster.
00:19:17
Speaker
Since then, the catfish has regularly appeared as a symbol for earthquakes, either as the cause or a warning." End quote. So the
Indigenous Stories and Earthquake Symbolism
00:19:26
Speaker
whole reason why I wanted to talk about Onomatsu today is Nomatsu-i. So I've included a roundup of prints in the show notes, and please, please, please, please, please do yourself a favor and look at them. So something I came to... So don't look at them yet, Anna, because I'm going to say something important.
00:19:43
Speaker
Something I came to appreciate during my time volunteering at the Asian Art Museum as somebody who knows about the art of Western Asia, but I was working a lot with art of East Asia and other parts of Asia, is that in order to fully admire visual culture, in my case it was especially Japanese woodblock prints and paintings,
00:20:06
Speaker
It's important to have an understanding of the historical and social context because they're very dense with meaning. But even without it, you can come away with a sense of this is working through complex grief and fear and kind of appreciate it on kind of a like, I get it.
00:20:22
Speaker
Like, I don't understand it, but I recognize it. Or I like, oh, that's a joke. I like that. And so looking at the Namadzu-i, there are things that feel evident, like fear of buildings falling down around you, anger over the cosmic injustice of it all, and making fun of the thing that you want to blame it all on. And there's something else that appears in several that I cannot let go. One print, which is to be hung on your ceiling for apotropaic purposes. Anna?
00:20:52
Speaker
Epitropaic warding off evil. Yeah. So it depicts the God Kashima looking very angry as a bunch of catfish wearing kimono prostrate themselves before him an apology for causing earthquakes while he was away.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah, they're just all being like, they're so little. They're just like these little guys being like, oh, I'm just a little guy. And it's amazing. So don't get me wrong. There are like plenty of them where it's just like a straight up catfish, like a huge catfish.
00:21:24
Speaker
And then there are others where they're just wearing clothes. And there's another where a catfish and his catfish family are being closed in upon by a mob of angry people. Oh, no. Like seeking revenge for doing this. For sure, yeah. Yeah. And they're wearing clothes. And I want you to see the catfish in kimono. Who knew that fishing clothes was my brand of humor? This fish thinks he's people. It's very funny. Oh, look at that guy.
00:21:53
Speaker
Look at that guy in his robe. Yeah, it's just like. And so there's a man dressed as a catfish. No, no, he's a catfish, but he's also a man. I know he's got hands and stuff, but he's and some of them have little like fan. It's great. It's so great.
00:22:07
Speaker
It's really great. And there are others... Oh, there's little guys. Do you see the one where they're apologizing? They're all like, oh no, I'm so sorry. Oh gosh. And the God is like, the God's like, yes. They've all got that smile on their face that your dog does when dog knows dog did bad.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah. And they've all got the little, they've got the catfish whiskers. So they've got the two little, the little things that stick out from catfishes. Like these people, like they knew what catfish looked like. I love this samurai catfish. It's all the one at the catfish and armor. Yeah.
00:22:42
Speaker
Brilliant. Amazing. I love this. I love them. So our clumsy fishy friend isn't all bad though. He's also a comrade. So the upheaval and destruction of property that comes along with an earthquake was seen as an opportunity for wealth to be redistributed across the impoverished and reduce inequity and resources, even if only briefly.
00:23:03
Speaker
So this all fit into the idea of Yonaoshi, a regular renewal of the world and extends hope for a turning of the table so that the poor might inherit the wealth of the rich. So for this reason, Onomatsu are sometimes associated with like brief good luck or a windfall. And so by the by,
00:23:26
Speaker
Yeah, so by the by I checked up on the connection between thrashy catfish and earthquake warning. And it seems to be a myth that persists to this day and has like research funding dumped into it. So Japan is an extremely seismically active area and with massive earthquakes like the 1855 on-site Edo earthquake that
00:23:51
Speaker
that sort of spawned that genre and the 1995 Kobe earthquakes in recent historical memory. It's understandable that researchers and the entities that fund research would be interested in finding something, anything that might be helpful in predicting earthquakes. Unfortunately, it's not something that could be predicted really like well at all, even by twitchy catfish.
00:24:15
Speaker
but on the subject. Not their whiskers, huh? No, but they use, so the theory was that they're good at electromagnetic signaling. Oh, okay, so a disturbance in that? Yeah, they thought that it could be something like that. So it's not just like, it's not crap. Oh, I didn't think it was out of nowhere. I just thought maybe they would be sensing seismic vibrations before anyone else could just get into those little whiskers.
00:24:43
Speaker
No, not really. They're not great. They try putting them in clothes first. Oh my God. It's great. It's great. It's so great. There's so many of them where it's like there's one where it's like a group of men inspecting an image of a catfish and the guy's like holding up like a picture of like a literal catfish and it's just like
00:25:06
Speaker
This is the one. And everyone's like, mmm, catfish. It's great. It's a beautiful art. There's a lot going on. And some of them have fish wearing clothes.
00:25:19
Speaker
Who knew? So, on the subject of earthquakes, I want to touch briefly on folklore from another part of the Ring of Fire, indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest. There are several groups which have stories of Thunderbird and whale, in which Thunderbird attacks whale by driving its talons into whale's back, and whale dives down into the ocean, pulling Thunderbird down and drowning him, because it kind of stuck in there. Very metal.
00:25:44
Speaker
These stories tie together the phenomena of earthquakes and tsunamis, which are always of grave concern for those living close to the coast. So it understood that there is a causal relationship between earthquakes and tsunamis. So there's another earthquake-related monster in folklore, which I find very compelling in this general area. There's several groups that have similar stories of the yajos.
00:26:12
Speaker
So in
Shape-shifting Spirits and Geological Understanding
00:26:13
Speaker
1985, a Seattle Weekly article referred to something called a spirit boulder near the Fauntleroy Ferry Dock in what's today Seattle, which was associated with the Ahiaas. So I'm going to include a quote from an article that I'll mention in a second. I'll give you more context for it. So they say, native stories often describe Ahiaas in a way that could refer to earthquake effects, especially landslides.
00:26:40
Speaker
Ah, Yahos is a shapeshifter, often appearing as an enormous serpent, sometimes double-headed with blazing eyes and horns, or as a composite monster having the forequarters and head of a deer and the tail of a snake. Ah, Yahos is a doctor spirit power, which means that it's reserved for shaman. So it's one of the most powerful personal spirit powers, malevolent and dangerous to encounter.
00:27:07
Speaker
Ayahos is associated with shaking and rushes of turbid water and comes simultaneously from land and sea. So, saying, at the spot where Ayahos came to a person, the very earth was torn, landslides occurred, and the trees became twisted and warped. Such spots were recognizable for years afterward. So, cool story, right?
00:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, so that Seattle Weekly story was published in 1985, being like, cool, cool story from like indigenous myth, cool. And then in 1992, geological evidence of an earthquake from around 900 CE estimated a magnitude of 7.4, so like a big one, was published and the Seattle Fault, which... Was the spirit boulder near that? On it.
00:28:02
Speaker
So the Seattle Fault is now recognized as a substantial hazard to the Seattle Urban Area. So prior to 1992, they didn't know that this was, that there was a fault line here, much less that it was like, it wasn't active. It's sort of like how like New Madrid, like the New Madrid Fault like doesn't do a whole lot, but when it does,
00:28:25
Speaker
We're in for it, like that kind of thing. Oh, I don't like to think about that, but yes, I do know what you're talking about. Yeah. So the earthquake that happened around 900 CE caused seven meters of vertical uplift on the southern side, sent massive block landslides tumbling into what's today called Lake Washington, and created a tsunami in what's today called Puget Sound that left sand deposits on southern Whidbey Island.
00:28:52
Speaker
Stories about ajajos mention a number of specific places in the central Puget Sound, along the Hood Canal and on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, as far west as the El Juan River. A total of 13 ajajos sites are mentioned in various stories, and these locales coincide with shallow faults around the Puget Sound, including the Little River Fault along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Tacoma Fault, and the Price Lake Scarps.
00:29:20
Speaker
Five of the Aayahos story sites are located very close to the trace of the Seattle Fault. Four of the Seattle locales can be associated with landslides or reports of land level changes that might have been caused by the 900 CE Seattle earthquake. Additional native stories related to the shaking, landsliding, or land level change are associated with three of these sites.
00:29:43
Speaker
So, twist, this, the a yahoo story isn't about us, the snakey looking monster, it's oral history. So indigenous populations before anyone, anywhere, like 900 CE, had developed seismology as a scientific endeavor, identified the fault lines and passed on this knowledge. So once again, we have an example of science in the global north,
00:30:08
Speaker
catching up with indigenous knowledge. And also if you think about how a fault line emerges, like if you have like uplift, it's sneaky. Yeah. So the above comes from an article in the show notes that happens to pull together both sides of the ocean and pull in some seismology.
00:30:25
Speaker
called
Debunking Myths: Protoceratops and Griffins
00:30:26
Speaker
Folklore and Earthquakes, Native American oral traditions from Cascadia compared with written traditions from Japan. I really recommend you check it out if this has piqued your interest because it's really cool to see the ways in which deep history and oral history and also like recent written history in the case of like the Edo earthquake in 1855, how they do have a role
00:30:52
Speaker
in understanding natural phenomena and, and, and sort of recovering from and protecting against in the future. Because if you know, like, you don't want to be around, like when an eye catfish start partying. Well, like, so you have a sense of where these things are, because what if it comes back or something? Right. Oh, just so cool.
00:31:19
Speaker
And now, another monster origin that I had no idea was a thing and that I am now baffled by. And you also know it isn't a thing. No, it's super not a thing. I'm still baffled. From paleontologist Mark Witten's blog, why protoceratops almost certainly wasn't the inspiration for the Griffin legend. And this is from Mark Witten's own website. Yeah, answering a question that we didn't even know we were supposed to have asked.
00:31:47
Speaker
I didn't know it was a question, truly. But then I asked it and was met with this. One thing that everyone knows about the mid-sized late Cretaceous Asian horned dinosaur protoceratops is that it's thought to be a fossil with historic mythological significance.
00:32:04
Speaker
Specifically, it's said to be the origin for the griffin, the lion-bodied, bird-headed chimera that has appeared in art and folklore for thousands of years. You could be forgiven for thinking that this idea is quite old and established because it's mentioned frequently in books, TV shows, and online articles.
00:32:20
Speaker
but it's actually a relatively modern invention. What I'll be calling the Protoceratops-Griffin hypothesis was first proposed by Adrian Mayer and Michael Heaney in the 1993 folklore paper, Griffins and Aromaspians, and then developed by Mayer across two editions of the book, the first Fossil Hunters, Paleontology in Greek and Roman times.
00:32:44
Speaker
These authors were not the first to suggest that the griffin had a basis in ancient interpretations of fossil animals, but they presented the first argument linking griffins to horned dinosaurs, as well as a suite of historic evidence supporting their interpretation. The idea has been praised by several paleontologists and is celebrated as one of the superior accounts of fossils influencing ancient mythology.
00:33:06
Speaker
The basic premise of the Protoceratops-Griffin hypothesis is straightforward. Tales of ancient Greek explorers of the 7th century BCE, but first written about in the 5th century BCE, include discussions of vicious, beaked, gold-guarding, quadrupedal animals living in deserts to the northeast of Greece. These stories are said to have originated with the Scythians, nomadic peoples who mined gold from Central Asia from localities close to the bone beds of Protoceratops in Mongolia and China.
00:33:35
Speaker
It is reasoned that Scythian nomads saw the weathering skeletons of protoceratops as they prospected for gold and told others of their existence. The Greeks interpreted these as real-life versions of the griffins they knew from history and the mythology as we know it was born." End quote.
00:33:52
Speaker
And then Whitten treats readers of his blog to a Griffin timeline with some really detailed thoughts about comparative anatomy and geography of fossil locations compared with various legends. And then he finishes up with, quote, with all this said, it seems invoking protoceratops to the Griffin myth is nothing but a complication for Griffin origins. Data has to be selected to fit this model and then worked around rather than with
00:34:18
Speaker
existing ideas on Gryphon origins that better account for its history, cultural diversity, and spread among ancient peoples. So no, I can't see any reason to think Protoceratops has anything to do with Gryphon lore and entirely understand the mainstream view of it as a chimeric animal
00:34:35
Speaker
cooked up by ancient cultures of the Near East. Interestingly, none of the recent papers on Gryphon lore and imagery I looked at in preparation for this article mention the Protoceratops Gryphon hypothesis, and it's surprisingly challenging to find much mention of it in any peer-reviewed literature. This is despite its 23-year vintage and wide popularity among educators, media outlets, and some paleontologists. It clearly has not been adopted as readily by archaeologists as by those of us interested
00:35:16
Speaker
I think they got it backwards. So rather than saying that the fossil was the origin of the mythology, it's the opposite of that. So I think that it's reasonable to think that Scythians and Greeks and Romans, whenever they're bopping around, if they make it out there, if they see these fossil animals, they would just be like, it's a griffin.
00:35:26
Speaker
and dinosaur science." End quote.
00:35:45
Speaker
Right, and already knowing about griffins, they would be like, that looks like... It looks like a griffin. Took all the meat off a griffin, right? Yeah. Those are griffin bones. Cool. That's fine. This is my so what approach to things. I mean, like, okay. And also there were millennia earlier there are griffins in Sousa.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah, but this guy's a paleontologist, not an archeologist. No, the people who wrote the hypothesis, the people who wrote the book, should have had, like, this is something where it's just like, maybe classicists should talk to people who work in other places.
00:36:27
Speaker
Maybe they should, but also sort of to, um, sort of like to, to witness credit or sort of like to, to sort of lean into that idea of like people that don't know anything about the ancient world, like love this. So if you go to the American museum of natural history's website, I'll have a link in the show notes, they've got Griffin bones and it's a little thing. So they have, um, they do like comparative anatomy, which is like, it has four legs, just like a Griffin has a beat.
00:36:57
Speaker
just like it, but a little call back to a few episodes, a few months ago. So the Protoceratops was discovered. It was found poking out, it's a little beaky poking out of the ground by my new obsession, Roy Chapman Andrews.
Caribbean Folklore and Cultural Amalgamation
00:37:17
Speaker
And O.M.F.G. Anna, did you know that he's the Andrews of Andrews Arcus? I don't know what Andrews Arcus is. What?
00:37:27
Speaker
I don't know. Is that a thing I know? So Andrew's Arcus is like a, why don't you, why don't you click on that? Look at my Andrew's Arcus. I was obsessed with this one as a little one. And so it was, it's just this like mat massive jaws. And they thought maybe it was like a massive dog, but it's sort of hippo-y. It's like a wolf hippo. Whoa.
00:37:47
Speaker
But it was named that. So, so when you discover creatures, you're not allowed to name them after yourself. So let's know it has to be a colleague who does it with somebody. Yeah. It was somebody on his team who found it. They named it after him. And I've been like obsessed with this thing since I was like seven and like, see, it's meant to be me and Roy Chapman Andrews.
00:38:06
Speaker
It's like all of those, what is it, 30 to 50 feral hogs kind of combined and formed a super hog. This is a thing that you need. Well, I'm glad I know about this now. I don't think I, you know how, I mean, I thought I had a dinosaur phase as a kid, but I don't, I think I just sort of played with dinosaurs. I had a megafauna phase. I didn't have a dinosaur phase. No, I know. But like all of that combined, I don't think I know as much about dinosaurs and megafauna as I think I thought I did when I was a little kid.
00:38:36
Speaker
I don't know. But this I am delighted to meet this guy. Yeah. All right. Well, turning our attention to the Caribbean, I want to take a moment to talk about Jumbies. So through the twin forces of colonization and the Atlantic slave trade, Caribbean folklore is informed by indigenous West African and South Asian traditions. The category of lurking scary monsters in Caribbean folklore is known as the Jumbies.
00:39:05
Speaker
I want to mention a couple here, courtesy of the Brown Geeks. The first one we'll talk about is the Chorley. And the Chorley is a revenant. So a revenant is something that has died and then been brought back to life to haunt the living. And the Chorley originally hails from South Asia, but occupies the folklore of the Caribbean, too, and has evolved a bit. So and a Chorley is a spirit of a woman who died in childbirth.
00:39:30
Speaker
So some stories say that she died, but her child survived. So she's roaming the world at night searching for her baby so that she can take it with her to the spirit realm. Others say that the child also died and then became a spirit as well, possibly with her, unsure. So she has, she's described as having long stringy hair covering her face.
00:39:54
Speaker
And she's either depicted carrying a crying baby in her arms or wandering alone, sort of through in torment of separation. So she haunts pregnant women. So she haunts pregnant people, newborn babies, and very young children, and is said to cause miscarriages or infant mortality.
00:40:15
Speaker
Um, and so she, if she sounds kind of like it'd be, and she, there's something else too, because it surely is known for high pitched whaling. Um, and, and she's motivated by, by grief and sort of, she, it's motivated by like grief and jealousy. And kind of a La Llorona esque as well.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah, so moving on from Guyana with African and indigenous roots, there's the Masakoraman. So he's a large hairy dude and he's real big. He's real big, he's bigger and taller than an average man and he's got very sharp teeth. So legend has it.
00:41:01
Speaker
that he dwells in the interior of Guyana, which is quite densely forested, and he lurks in the rivers, waiting to attack and capsize any boat that comes by, and then he'll eat you. Pretty straightforward. Scary teeth will eat you.
00:41:21
Speaker
I'm sure there is more nuance to the story, but as I learned from Miranda Debra here at the Brown Geeks. And then the last one that I want to talk about from here, and there are more in this post, and it's very interesting to see the way that different cultures sort of interplay and develop new things. But there's the Dewan.
00:41:46
Speaker
from Trinidad. So a duin is the spirit of a child who died before it was baptized and thus is destined to roam the earth. So they are genderless, faceless creatures who wear huge straw hats that look like mushrooms on their very large heads and they have feet that are turned backwards.
00:42:09
Speaker
Duans are often seen playing in forests and they'll come up to your kids and they'll be like, come play with us. And so they lure the children into the forest and then they like ghost them and the children are lost and abandoned forever.
00:42:30
Speaker
don't trust strange kids with backward feet and no face. Yeah, but yeah, so pretty big bummer. So there are others that are less of a bummer and more of a, well, huh. But I do recommend you check out Miranda D, author Miranda DeBraz Roundup for more.
Historical Impact of Monster Depictions
00:42:48
Speaker
I shall.
00:42:49
Speaker
So how do we know what all these monsters look like? I mean, in some cases you get oral histories and descriptions. And sure, you might describe a dragon, but you can't really know how someone sees a monster until they put what's in their imagination into a picture. And there are some pretty old picture books full of monsters. One such collection of these is described in a 2018 article from Smithsonian Magazine. Oh, this is just very funny.
00:43:14
Speaker
Quote, in December 1495, Rome was devastated by four days of heavy flooding. After the deluge subsided, rumors began to swirl about a terrible monster that had washed up onto the banks of the Tiber. The creature was said to be a grotesque pastiche of human and animal body parts. It had, among other peculiarities, the head of a donkey, the breasts of a woman, the bearded visage of an old man on its behind, and a tail crowned with a roaring dragon's head.
00:43:42
Speaker
This was the creature called the papal ass, thought to be an ominous portent of papal corruption and something that is referenced multiple times in literature of that era, even by Martin Luther of 95 Theses fame.
00:43:56
Speaker
The Papal Ass is just one of many strange, unsettling creatures to appear in the pages of centuries-old texts now on display at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto. Just in time for Halloween, the library has launched Demonstrus. Okay, just in time for Halloween 2018.
00:44:13
Speaker
Maybe it's still there. An exhibition that explores the rich tradition of monstrous beings that have stoked fears and tickled imaginations throughout history. Demonstrus spans a vast period of time, linking lore from antiquity to the Middle Ages and on through the 19th century.
00:44:30
Speaker
The show features writings by the likes of Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Mary Shelley. Also on display are vivid illustrations of dragons and basilisks, unicorns and cyclopes, mermaids and manticores, and more obscure hybrid creatures. Writers felt compelled to nod to previous descriptions of monsters in part so they could flaunt their scholarly knowledge. If you're telling, for example, the history of serpents, you have to include dragons because up to that point, it was part of the tradition.
00:44:58
Speaker
It's tradition. My father's monsters had dog's heads and his father's and his father's. Plus, as the Smithsonian is well aware, monsters attract an audience. End quote. Let's have one more quick ad break and then we'll wrap it up.
00:45:15
Speaker
We're back, and we've got one last monster from me. And this one works on multiple levels of monster. In Nazi Germany, various aspects of folklore and the occult were exploited for potential benefit to the Third Reich, which some of these are quite well known. But there's one that I didn't know about until I started pulling together sources for this episode, which was the werewolf, or Wiesachmann auf Deutsch der Wehrwolf.
00:45:43
Speaker
Yeah, der Wehrwolf. Yeah, that's actually the truth. So historian Erich Korlander, author of Hitler's Monsters, A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, says, quote, according to some 19th and early 20th century German folklorists, werewolves were represented flawed but well-meaning characters who may have be bestial but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil. They represented German strength and purity against interlopers, end quote.
00:46:12
Speaker
In October 1944, which if, you know, robust of the World War II may know is towards the end of it, Operation Werewolf began in which paramilitary groups would infiltrate Allied camps and sabotage their supply lines. This was a, this was a guerilla action, sort of like partisan effort at this point.
00:46:32
Speaker
So it wasn't designed to win the war because they knew that they weren't going to, but it was just designed to delay the inevitable loss long enough that maybe the resolution would be a bit more favorable to Germany.
00:46:46
Speaker
So Operation Werewolf extended into 1945, but the combination of bureaucratic static, confusing where orders for guerrilla efforts were supposed to come from, combined with exhaustion of military resources this late into the war, resulted in Operation Werewolf being a bust, but not before the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, tried to recruit new werewolves.
00:47:12
Speaker
So I'm going to do a quick quote from a Smithsonian story on this topic. Beginning early in 1945, national radio broadcasts urged German civilians to join the werewolf movement, fighting the Allies and any German collaborators who welcomed the enemy into their homes.
00:47:32
Speaker
One female broadcaster proclaimed, I am so savage, I am filled with rage. Lily the werewolf is my name. I bite, I eat, I am not tame. My werewolf, Keith, bite the enemy. So it kind of fell off there at the end. So Operation Werewolf wasn't a wildly popular initiative in Germany, but the semi-stochastic guerrilla attacks on Allied forces had them very freaked out, which was the point. Yeah.
00:48:00
Speaker
So it was if you're not able to perform sort of the military feats of strength, at least get them psyched out enough that they will sort of like stumble over their own feet. And so it was like, sounds effective. There were there were sort of some reports that were like, it's like, there aren't werewolves. They're not like, it's not a thing. And then others are like,
00:48:27
Speaker
Oh, no, it's real. And they became like very scared of like teens in Germany. So werewolf activity continued until 1947. And it's thought that there were several thousand casualties attributed to them. But what a bewildering testament to the power of monsters that this was sort of a last ditch effort of just like, we're just going to free. Try this. Yeah, worked.
00:48:53
Speaker
Well, finally, just for fun, and because there are some really interesting history nuggets to be found, let's wrap up this week with a quick look at the actual Monster Mash, the goofy song by Bobby Boris Pickett that became a smash hit in the 60s. So a quote from TDM.co, a brilliantly campy graveyard slab of woozy surf rock. Monster Mash is the most monstrously catchy of all the Halloween anthems, which are there other ones? Yeah. What am I missing? Thriller?
00:49:20
Speaker
No, I was thinking of, I don't know, the entire discography of The Misfits. That's fair. Three seasons of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina soundtrack. Oh. AFI. All right. Spooky music. I love Halloween carols. Originally written by Bobby Pickett, Somerville's own.
00:49:43
Speaker
Somerville, Massachusetts's own Bobby Pickett. I spent a lot of time in Somerville. Aspiring actor by day, singer in doo-wop group The Cordials by night, the 1962 novelty smash hit first came about when Pickett was performing the doo-wop tune Little Darlin' by the Diamonds and decided to pull out his impression of horror actor Boris Karloff for the spoken monologue. And Pickett recalled in a 2006 interview with radio broadcaster Dr. Demento, the audience cracked up.
00:50:13
Speaker
After the set, his bandmate and fellow horror film buff Lenny Capizzi suggested that Pickett's impression had the legs for a full-length novelty song. So the pair got together and wrote Monster Mash in around an hour, using a Wollensack tape recorder.
00:50:30
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I mean, Monster Mash in an hour. I really also enjoy that on the recording they did all kinds of great Foley work to make like lab sounds. Cauldrons were created by blowing bubbles in glasses of water and the eerie creak of a coffin lid was in fact
00:50:48
Speaker
scraping a rusty nail on a table." So Americans loved it, and the song was a huge hit, even spawning a whole album of spooky tunes. But the BBC thought a song about a party in a graveyard was too morbid, so the song didn't even chart there until 1972. And with that, the sun's just poking up over the horizon, and any lingering trolls and boogins will be turned to stone or dispersed by its rays. So we'll leave you until next week, when we'll have one more spooky episode for you.
The Song 'Monster Mash' and Its Cultural Impact
00:51:17
Speaker
And you can find that episode and all our other episodes and everything else we do over on our website, TheDirtPod.com or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and wherever else you like to listen. The Ether.
00:51:32
Speaker
You can also find us on social media on Facebook. We're the dirt podcast on Twitter. We are at dirt podcast and on Instagram. We're at the dirt pod and check out our website, the dirt pod.com for merch, the link to our Patrion, where you can support the show resources for research with links to all the things that we use to write the shows and more. Thanks for listening. Everybody. We love you.
Conclusion and Credits
00:51:56
Speaker
Bye.
00:52:03
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.